New World Acoming--and a New Peril, Too : Soviets: Moscow moves from one-party to one-man rule. The switch to democracy and pluralism is far more difficult and dangerous.

That the crisis of Soviet communism has ended the Cold War is by now axiomatic, but what kind of world will follow is far from clear. The dominant view in the West seems to be that upheavals in the communist world have been caused by and must be managed by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The presumed conversion of erstwhile adversaries to pluralism and market economics is believed by many to have ended not only the Cold War but history itself.

Such views leave the democracies--at the moment of their greatest triumph--dangerously irrelevant in the emerging world. For the deeper the upheaval of the old order, the more urgent is the task of constructing a new one. And in the end, the outcome of Gorbachev’s revolution is far from clear; it may produce, rather than a linear progression toward democracy, chaos--the replacement of one-party rule by one-man rule and repression, or all three in succession.

The West diminishes both Gorbachev and itself by giving him all the credit for what is happening in the communist world. Gorbachev’s policies did not arise from a blinding flash of insight; like all serious political leaders he has had to respond to necessity. Gorbachev is a remarkable personality who deserves great credit for acting courageously to overcome the crisis of his society. But the steadfastness of the democracies in resisting communist expansionism over four decades is what created the current international environment. Internally, three realities have driven the changes in the Soviet Union: economic collapse, the difficulty that mature communist systems have in achieving political legitimacy and the nationalities problem. Like the popular Russian dolls, each of these is nestled within the other. Gorbachev’s dilemma is that the ideal solution for each is to a considerable extent incompatible with the best solution for the others.

The Soviet economic crisis is by now familiar; so are the necessary solutions. Yet no centrally planned economy has ever managed the transition to market economics. The Soviet Union has so far taken only the most tentative steps in the direction of price reform and the ending of subsidies, two preconditions for the establishment of market economics. China came closest to taking these steps but suffered the catastrophe of Tian An Men Square, largely because economic reform outgrew the Chinese political institutions’ tolerance for it.

To avoid this outcome, Gorbachev is giving top priority to political reform. He is in a better position than anyone to gauge two heretofore insuperable political obstacles: that the Communist Party is institutionally committed to central planning, and that the longer a communist system governs, the more surely it deprives its leadership of the moral authority to ask sacrifices of its people. No Soviet leader has ever retired voluntarily. Nor has the reputation of any Soviet leader other than Lenin survived his own death. A society incapable of generating heroes--or even continuity--is in no position to demand sacrifice.

Gorbachev’s political reforms seek to weaken the resistance of the communist bureaucracy by giving him a popular legitimacy. But in Eastern Europe opening up the Communist Party has proved its death knell. Democracy requires a belief that the contest of ideas will produce something close to the truth. By contrast, communists, regarding themselves as the repositories of historical truth, consider compromise a bourgeois evasion that dilutes power. Deprived of the instruments of state power, East European Communist parties, not designed for democratic contest, are disintegrating at the first whiff of open politics.

Because the countries in Eastern Europe had the advantage of a national tradition, the collapse of unpopular Communist parties spurred political cohesion. But disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is unlikely to have the same result.

For the Soviet Union is an empire, not a national state. Only slightly more than half its population is Russian; glasnost has not produced any hint of an all-Soviet non-Communist Party. The real political contests are waged inside the Politburo and inside the constituent republics. Glasnost tempts Communist parties in various republics to become independent of Moscow, a process accelerated by opposing parties even more stridently nationalistic. The emergence of real pluralism is inhibited because the democratic tradition in most of the Soviet Union is highly tenuous. Currents that produced pluralism in the West passed Russia by or touched it only tangentially: the struggle between Pope and emperor, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the concept of free enterprise.

I believe--unhappily--that the least likely Soviet outcome is linear evolution to pluralistic democracy and market economics. The relative pluralism now emerging may have as its ultimate result a virulent nationalism in the constituent republics and, on the all-Soviet level, the replacement of one-party rule by one-man rule, in effect making Gorbachev the czar. Once in the possession of the trappings of state power, his course, and even more that of his successor, becomes unpredictable. It could mean stagnation or worse.

History will always remember Gorbachev for having stood aside while Eastern Europe freed itself and for having started the transformation of the Soviet state. If the Soviet Union continues to reduce the percentage of its gross national product devoted to defense and its retreat from far-flung outposts such as Cuba, assistance in speeding the supply of consumer goods and technical help--as sketched by Secretary of State James A. Baker III and proposed by Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel--is surely appropriate.

But in the end Gorbachev’s most intractable problems will be beyond the reach of outside powers. Like all other revolutionaries, Gorbachev could be consumed by the process he started. Gearing Western policies largely to the desire to “help” Gorbachev would create three points of vulnerability for the West: it would tempt Gorbachev to turn his tenure into the principal quid pro quo of diplomacy; it would create paralysis in the democracies if he is engulfed by consequences of his own achievements, and it would damage the credibility of leaders who have staked too much on a single Soviet personality, however meritorious.

The most worrisome outcomes of the crisis of communism are two sides of the same coin: on the one hand, a return to traditional great Russian repression of the nationalities; on the other, the disintegration of an empire built up in the 400 years since Ivan the Terrible.

A nationalistic Russia could resume the pressures to which imperial Russia subjected all contiguous areas in Europe and Asia for more than 200 years. A disintegrating Russia could tempt neighboring countries to restore historic ties with their kinsmen or simply to carve up the Soviet Union on the basis of traditional expansionism.

The world has suffered so much at the hands of communist ideology that it has nearly forgotten how uncomfortable a neighbor czarist Russia had been. Often invaded across a flat plain without natural frontiers, Russia grew to identify security with pushing out its frontiers as far as possible. However understandable, that caused the Russian Empire throughout its history to seek to dismantle every power center within its reach: Poland, Turkey, Sweden, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, China, India.

One of history’s jokes may be that the successors of Lenin will end up holding the Russian state together with practices used by heirs of Peter the Great. The nationalism of the smaller Soviet republics has already stimulated a virulent counterpart in the Russian Republic itself. But Russian nationalism has always been repressive and expansionist.

The challenge to the foreign policy of the democracies is to use the hiatus--as Moscow must give priority to domestic problems--to put in place a security system seeking to transcend the historic Russian quest for absolute security, which has meant absolute insecurity for everyone else.

In Europe such a system should return Soviet armies to national territory as quickly as possible. The intricate balance of arms-control negotiation along existing military dividing lines obscures the real problem of establishing a realistic political dividing line. But once Soviet troops are returned home, such a system must then also strive for an arrangement that genuinely reduces Soviet fears of military attack from Europe.

All this must be accomplished while keeping in mind a diametrically opposite danger to the peace of the world: the possibility of a break-up of the Soviet state. The West can have no more interest in the disintegration of the Soviet Union than in its expansion. I would except the Baltic republics. Their annexation, never having been recognized by the West in the heyday of Soviet power, cannot now be accepted in the period of glasnost and perestroika .

But for the rest, the West must take great care to avoid steps with unforeseeable consequences. The collapse of authority in a country that possesses tens of thousands of nuclear weapons must be of greatest concern to all humanity. The problem is so terrifying, so contrary to traditional notions of sovereignty, that it requires cogent study.

Nuclear perils aside, the breakup of the Soviet Union would surely produce an extraordinary cycle of violence. Like a movie run in reverse, it could play back a brutal two centuries, and in the end draw in all surrounding countries whose competition provided the temptation for Soviet expansion in the first place.

To be sure, if Moscow is unable to preserve the Russian state, neither Washington nor other democracies are in a position to do so. But the West can practice circumspection, while experience must have taught Moscow that there is a level of repression that jeopardizes the democracies’ domestic support for a policy of detente.

Coming to grips with such contradictory prospects will force America to examine categories of thought it has historically rejected; to act not with missionary zeal but as custodian of an equilibrium, and to adjust policies to the fluctuating requirements of a balance of power rather than fixed legal principles or a doctrine of collective security. In that sense, the ultimate challenge to U.S. foreign policy is philosophical.